The 4th CIRP International Conference on High Performance Cutting had been held at the Nagaragawa Convention Center in Gifu City of Japan in October 2010. The scope of the conference was to review and discuss the visions, state of the art and innovations in the area of high performance cutting and related manufacturing technologies. This conference is originated from the CIRP Working Group in High Performance Cutting established by Professor G. Byrne in 2001. After four workshops in Europe, the 1st international conference on HPC was held in Aachen in 2004 chaired by Professor Byrne and Professor F. Klocke. The second one was held in Vancouver under the chairmanship of Professor Y. Altintas and the 3rd one was organized by Professor Byrne and Dr. O’connell in Dublin. In this conference, 144 interesting papers were presented from 19 countries. The editorial committee of IJAT selected the excellent papers presented at the conference and requested the authors to contribute manuscripts in expanded version of conference papers. As a result, 25 papers were accepted for the publication. I believe that this special issue provides the readers valuable information at the leading edge of manufacturing technologies. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all of the authors and reviewers for their invaluable effort.
The 39th international conference of the EURO working group on operational research applied to health services: ORAHS 2013 special issue
